International Booker Prize nominees: 13 books to get you talking

The selected books were originally written in 11 languages, including Bulgarian, Chinese, Danish and Swedish. Read more at straitstimes.com.

LONDON - A novel about a director making movies under Nazi rule. A tale of a war veteran with amnesia who is unsure whether his wife is who she says she is. And a book about an unexceptional witch.

These titles are among the 13 books nominated for 2026’s International Booker Prize, the prestigious award for fiction translated into English.

Natasha Brown, a British author who is chairing the judging panel in 2026, said in a news release on Feb 24 that many of the 128 books considered for the prize in 2026 had examined the consequences of war.

Although that topic is the focus of some of the 13 titles that made the cut, Brown said they also featured “petty squabbles between neighbours, mysterious mountain villages, Big Pharma conspiracies, witchy women, ill-fated lovers, a haunted prison and obscure film references”.

The selected books were originally written in 11 languages, including Bulgarian, Chinese, Danish and Swedish. Some are new titles, although one nominee, Shahrnush Parsipur’s Women Without Men, was originally published in Persian in 1989, and Penguin is publishing an English translation in 2026.

Perhaps the highest-profile nominee is Daniel Kehlmann’s The Director, translated from the original German by Ross Benjamin, about the largely forgotten 20th-century Austrian film-maker G.W. Pabst, who finds himself compromising his artistic principles while stuck in his Nazi-controlled homeland.